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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

671–680 of 873 posts

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#671
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is fucking miserable Reddit is the town bar, the popular one. Some people love the town bar! :) Some people hate the town bar! :(

Things like this can often be assessed on a macro level. When you start to get the number of users sites like Facebook have and sites like Reddit claim they have, you end up with content that's reflective of a broad sample of society. You do have that on Facebook, you do not have that on Reddit. I suspect Reddit is intentionally overcounting by doing things like counting multiple devices as different users, multiple…

I tried to start using Reddit. None of my friends had ever heard of it or wanted to use it, and I soon lost interest in it.

From my little experience of using it, it seems that its main audience is the mentally retarded or just children under 11 years old.

The same questions are asked all the time. It wasn't difficult for me to find a search on the site for why they don't use it?

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments/answers, which they state with full confidence.

And there was also a feeling that there are rarely disagreements in discussions, even if there are minor differences, everyone adheres to a single line, often related to the topic/name of the subreddit.

I found several people creating content that I was interested in, but some of the posts on the page were hidden and it was easier to follow them on YouTube or blogs.

In general, searching for valuable posts or comments is like digging through manure to find gold.

And even if you find a clever idea or a good technical hint, it was often easier to find it just by reading the documentation. It's the same with interesting posts. If it's something worthwhile, then it will be on twitter, blog, YouTube, social networks or in some forums.

I'm not talking about advertising every second post, or even among the comments. Disabling ad blocking was a mistake.

> it's representative of an insular clubhouse with some small rooms in the backyard for 'normies.'

A very appropriate definition. It's not even interesting to discuss something on Reddit. If your opinion or thought coincides with the ideology of the subreddit, then you will have a lot of likes. If it don't match, you get dislikes, insults, or worse, no response.

In general, I did not find any benefit for myself on Reddit and I am unlikely to return there, it is a waste of energy and effort.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of comm…

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a tota…

The problem with Discord is that I have to know exactly where stuff is for me to access it.

There is absolutely zero chance I find something interesting on Discord just by "browsing" Discord. I have to be in a community that already exists elsewhere to get the Discord server link or just accidentally stumble upon the server link somewhere other than Discord.

And If I do find an interesting Discord that is active, forget about seeing what people were talking about before.

All the interesting and or useful stuff posted on Discord is completely walled off and hidden away and might as well not exist after it was posted. I'm never going to find a Discord thread when browsing for something on the internet.

I genuinely think Discord is one of the more terrible things that has happened to the internet and the fact that it is replacing forums is a damn shame.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#673

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

As someone who is completely disinterested in sports[1], I like this analogy.

-----------------------------

[1] Watching them, anyway. I like playing, but I get almost sleepy-coma-like boredom by watching it. Probably a personality deficiency, but meh.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#674
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book) Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.

I like her take-away from this experiment: Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together." I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a be…

> They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better.

How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#675
post #24

Haha no wonder, check out the website its dodgy as f. https://bigtop.co.za/

Checked out as instructed, it somehow made me empathetic towards the OP. Not only the business completely harmless, it's the opposite: their job is trying to make people happy, and it's lovely.

Off-topic reply but I don't want to start another comment:

The problem about Google and AI has deeper layers: AI answers has trained users to not look into the source information (a.k.a websites), and websites are combating it by making themselves harder to crawl (for example, by enabling Cloudflare protection/verification), which in turn makes creating new search engine harder.

This down circle is currently unbreakable, which is a hellish situation for new comers, but great for established players such as Reddit, Facebook etc since they have internal search engine as well as mountains amount of content to provide.

If one day the big platforms (there are only handful of them) completely blocked Google from crawling them, that will be the true death of Google.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see how much of a behemoth Discord has become. Seems like there's a Discord for everything - from open source projects to hobbies and games to individual groups of friends/family. It's occupying the segment that subreddits historically have. However, it's perhaps-intentionally search-opaque. You can't Google to find a message/link/download that's gated by Discord. And it also gives a sense of comm…

Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies. In theory Reddit was supposed to be this but 1. Reddit communities tend to get too large 2. Subreddits overflow into each other too much through cross posting and brigading 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a tota…

The problem about this, for me, is discoverability. I have loads of hobbies that I'd love to engage with the communities of, but how do you engage with servers of that size without actively being invited to them?

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#677

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

> It's an interesting thought experiment to explore what it means if that actually is the new normal, and people are not consuming media or much of anything, or even if the people who are still addicted to social media are now tapped out and don't have any more disposable income left to spend.

Even if they do have disposable income to spend, the lack of working ads means that they're getting their vendors in a different way.

Some speculation follows: If advertisements as the main driver of sales went away, wouldn't that help smaller players gain a foothold against incumbents? Because, while incumbents can use their war chest to push all newcomers to page 2 of the results. If the awareness is coming from somewhere else, being on page 2 of the results doesn't matter anymore, because no one is even seeing page 1 of the results anyway!

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#678
post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book) Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.

I like her take-away from this experiment: Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together." I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a be…

> We’re all in the same, but different, shit.

Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't suggest men couldn't understand, they actually offered a way to help foster understanding by creating the false profile. The ones who won't understand are those who make no effort to understand, and that's quite reasonable to say. A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are…

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Most men don't understand what women have to go through in everyday interactions and most women don't understand the same for men. And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, google search has stopped being useful years before "AI".

Is that why it kept it's market share and usage numbers?

They're paying right and left to be the default search option, aren't they?

Plus to be honest alternatives aren't much better. I use duckduckgo but the results are still a deluge of spam (content mills).

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